Home Office seeks big data specialists for project worth up to £8m

The Home Office is advertising for specialist big data teams to support digital, data and technology programmes in its immigration IT portfolio.

The Home Office wants to bring in specialists in big data for immigration IT portfolio - Photo credit: PA

The department is updating its digital systems using cloud and big data technologies, and is now advertising for a team of specialists to help develop its big data portfolio.

In an opportunity notice on the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 2 procurement framework, the Home Office said that the user was the immigration IT portfolio, which has responsibility for maintaining and improving immigration IT services.

The Home Office said that the budget was between £6m and £8m over two years, with work starting no later than May 2017. The initial statement of work is budgeted at up to £1m.

The work will see the specialists develop, implement and maintain a big data solution for portfolio programmes and projects in a large scale transactional and analytical data environment.

The initial requirement is for two agile delivery teams with core skills in cloud technologies, such as AWS or Azure, big data technologies such as Hadoop, and relational and non-relational database technologies.

Further delivery teams may be deployed over the course of the contract, the Home Office said.

The Home Office added that the big data solution was already in development, and as such the supplier will have to take responsibility of any code in development after a handover period with the incumbent.

The department said that it was “keen to understand” how quickly suppliers would be able to carry out the handover, as it wants this to happen “as soon as possible after contract award”.

A supplier question on the opportunity asked which contractors were involved in the prior work, and who the lead supplier was, but the response said that this would only be provided to the successful supplier. “This information is not relevant at this stage,” it said.

The new supplier will also be expected to build strong collaborative working relationships with the existing digital and tech teams, as well as other suppliers working with the Home Office, it said.

The closing date is 31 March, and the deadline for questions is 24 March.